Interesting to consider how people originally saw silent films. I claim no expert knowledge but my loose understanding is that what you describe was the case only up to about the mid-teens, as films were short (15 minutes or less) and the nickelodeon theaters would play an endless stream of different short films (sometimes with vaudeville-like entertainment like sing-alongs while reels were changed), a direct continuation of vaudeville theater but with the live acts replaced by short films. You wander in off the street when you have a little spare time (or on your way home from work, or while waiting for someone you’re with to finish their appointment nearby, or whatever) and you catch whatever act(s) or film(s) they happen to have running.
When I think of silent film, though, I guess I’m not thinking about nickelodeon short films. Around 1914 is when you get the major shift towards longer-form narrative films, with the first serial film, and then of course The Birth of a Nation, in 1915, changed everything. That one is 2-3 hours long (there are many different edits). You start to see “modern” movie theaters (and movie palaces) around then, which are very different from my understanding of what the nickelodeons were (basically darkened storefronts with primitive seating if they had seats at all).
With those longer-form films, you get set start times, and people paying attention to the entire thing. People casually wandered in and out of films for decades more, of course, but I think the norm changed dramatically in the late teens and through the 20s. It had to have been really variable depending on all kinds of factors, of course.
Obviously you can’t trust what you see in the movies to be truly representative of history, but The Purple Rose of Cairo is all about a woman who goes to movies in the 1930s in a small town, and you get a sense of what the experience might have been like, and it’s really a wonderful film anyway (to watch it now you do have to stomach that it’s a Woody Allen film starring Mia Farrow, though he doesn’t act in it). There’s a Bogdonovich film from 1976 called Nickelodeon that I need to see, that takes place in the early teens and ends with The Birth of a Nation (his 1973 Paper Moon, set in the 30s but not related to movies, is excellent).
The early movie-going experience in Japan was discussed as part of another course I took from the same professor on the more general history of Japanese cinema. My sense is that it was very similar to how it was here, except that they would have seen it as a continuation of their own theater styles instead of from vaudeville, so I suspect the vibe was different, but certainly similar. Cinema was brought there by people who experienced it abroad (probably in the US) in the 1890s (IIRC) and its development closely tracked what was happening in the US.
Coincidentally, in Rochester, NY, where I went to university, there is also a movie theater that has been in continuous operation since 1914; it originally had dirt floors and may have been more-or-less a nickelodeon in the beginning (the building was enlarged at some point, so it’s hard to know what the original layout and seating was like). They used to claim to be the oldest in continuous operation in the US, but that language has softened - must be another one somewhere, not to mention yours in Canada.
I’m curious, since you relate how important the theater is to you, what you’re into that you see there. In college the theater that was important to me was not the 1914 one but instead the one at the George Eastman House (very close to the 1914 theater actually), which has a major film archive (and film conservation school) and besides playing old films from the archive also has modern art and independent and documentary films doing the circuit, and e.g. new restoration prints that the studios put out, etc. Now I have access to the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, which is excellent (and gives you a true 1930s experience for e.g. Astaire/Rogers films), but they tend not to show a wide breadth of films. They’re currently doing a Hitchcock festival, which is awesome, except they did practically the exact same festival two years ago… that in itself is not a bad thing - I appreciate that there’s a place that you can go to see the most popular classic movies projected on film year after year - but they just don’t do the deep-cut selections that make the Eastman House or other places (like the Silent Movie Theater in LA) special.